Just three years ago, and even after consecutive military coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali hosted a major United Nations peacekeeping operation, a European Union military training operation, a five-nation West African regional military alliance, a French combat deployment, and Western militaries, to include the United States, providing support. Mali was also a member of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional bloc whose soldiers had intervened in several political crises in West Africa.
These multilateral operations were deployed under the overlapping legitimacies of the U.N. and the African Union and provided the infrastructural support for security and development operations throughout a country smaller than Alaska. While it is hard to put a price tag on these external initiatives, a rough estimate suggests that the international community was spending about $2 billion per year in Mali, or some 8 percent of the country’s GDP.
Just three years ago, and even after consecutive military coups in 2020 and 2021, Mali hosted a major United Nations peacekeeping operation, a European Union military training operation, a five-nation West African regional military alliance, a French combat deployment, and Western militaries, to include the United States, providing support. Mali was also a member of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional bloc whose soldiers had intervened in several political crises in West Africa.
These multilateral operations were deployed under the overlapping legitimacies of the U.N. and the African Union and provided the infrastructural support for security and development operations throughout a country smaller than Alaska. While it is hard to put a price tag on these external initiatives, a rough estimate suggests that the international community was spending about $2 billion per year in Mali, or some 8 percent of the country’s GDP.
Today, armed groups in Mali are expanding the territory that they control or in which they have full freedom of action. They apply economic pressure on Bamako by cutting off road access to the Malian capital, critically threatening fuel supplies. The junta has limited means of self-defense. Its armed forces, whose leadership claimed the mantle of saviors from corruption, battlefield failure, and foreign interference, are manned by soldiers who will not and cannot fight the various insurgent groups.
Its only allies are the Russian mercenaries it pays by further depleting its treasury and ransoming mining companies. The U.N. completed the withdrawal of its 15,000 peacekeeping forces in December 2023. France’s Operation Barkhane drew down in August 2022, with the United States suspending its military assistance at the same time. The G-5 Sahel, consisting of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, was disbanded in May 2022.
In Western media, civil society, and academic circles, the failure of external interventions in Mali has often been explained by the emphasis placed on military action, to the detriment of political dialogue and economic development. France, in particular, was often accused of having pursued an anti-terrorism strategy without considering the root causes of the conflict or the need for state-building after military operations.
Despite initial successes, the Serval and Barkhane operations were perceived as a form of neocolonialism motivated by geostrategic or economic “interests.” The coup leaders who took power in Bamako in 2021 have largely amplified this rationale. With the support of Russian disinformation campaigns, the military junta mobilized local and international public opinion around the narrative that Western support to Mali was an expression of neocolonial domination.
A New York Times story published in August recounts the junta’s well-rehearsed narrative. Following arrests of alleged coup plotters, Malian Security Minister Daoud Aly Mohammedine said the conspirators were working “on behalf of the French intelligence service, which mobilized political leaders, civil society actors and military personnel.” Even ECOWAS was branded as a tool of Western interests because its protocol on democracy and good governance stands against military seizure of power.
Assimi Goïta assumed power when he was serving as nominal vice president to the 2020 coup-installed President Bah Ndaw. In both coups, the army leadership and their co-opted civilian officials argued that the security operations led by regional and international partners neither defeated violent extremist groups nor restored government authority throughout the national territory. Ismaël Wagué, a spokesperson for the 2020 coup leaders, explained the rationale for the putsch in a televised statement at the time, saying, “Our country is sinking into chaos, anarchy, and insecurity mostly due to the fault of the people who are in charge of its destiny.” He may well have been right in 2020, but his observation is still valid five years later.
It would, of course, be absurd to claim that the various military interventions carried out in Mali since the early 2010s are beyond reproach. However, the emphasis placed on external actors in the Malian crisis, widely relayed by the military juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States—which also includes coup-stricken Burkina Faso and Niger—contributes to underestimating the role played by successive Malian governments in the deterioration of the security situation.
In part, this bias can be explained by the fact that, for outside observers, it is always far easier to understand the policies and actions of Western actors than the goals of the national elite in a country such as Mali. For the U.S., U.N., and European commentariat, policies are matters of public record; senior officials will provide on- and off-the-record briefings; legislative oversight provides additional windows into key decisions; and work can be done in French and English with officials who return phone calls and answer emails.
It does not work that way in Mali. Malian leaders face neither domestic nor international accountability; they operate opaquely and beyond the reach of media or civil society inquiries. While they present civilian ministers and spokespeople to their own people as well as the international community, those hapless figures do not speak for the military men who wield power.
This skews reporting away from indigenous actors and hides the fact that, long before the French intervention in 2013, the Malian government had developed a subtle strategy, which consisted of supporting global initiatives such as the war on terrorism in exchange for military and development aid. Far from powerless, President Amadou Toumani Touré and his aides were actively involved in presenting Mali as a source of terrorist threats in their talks with U.S. government representatives.
The attention paid by the media and political commentators to the problems encountered by military interventions in Mali has also contributed to obscuring their primary objectives. The dominant media focus on foreign-supported military operations in Mali was on tactical battlefield progress against violent extremist organizations. However, Mali’s unraveling did not occur because of a lack of foreign military support; it occurred despite it.
The government chose not to make concessions to the Tuareg separatists who helped start the insurgency, and then it fed Islamist violence by targeting civilians perceived to be disloyal. Although Western “conditionality” has become something of an epithet in Africanist circles, an examination of the first U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the Mali mission, or Minusma, is illustrative of the failure of successive Malian governments to address the crisis.
Security Council Resolution 2100, adopted in April 2013, does not explicitly impose conditions, but a reading of the standard U.N.-speak lays out clear and eminently reasonable expectations. Critically, the resolution says the U.N. role was in supporting the reestablishment of state authority throughout Mali’s national territory while making clear that the Malian government was primarily responsible for this task. More explicitly, the Security Council said, “the transitional authorities of Mali have primary responsibility for resolving the interlinked challenges facing their country and protecting all their citizens and that any sustainable solution to the crisis in Mali should be Malian-owned.”
Resolution 2100 was in many respects a classical transition from war-fighting to peace-building. France intervened to rapturous Malian public opinion when Islamists took control of major portions of the country and threatened the capital itself. Having stabilized the battlefield, France turned to the U.N. to oversee the implementation of the peace process that culminated in the 2015 signing of the Algiers Agreement.
This rapidly morphed into the widespread expectation that it was the job of the U.N. to reconquer rebel-held territory. Minusma was not mandated or equipped for such a role, and the countries that supplied forces to Minusma would not have authorized them to embark on such a mission. As analyst Michael Shurkin explained, the best thing an intervening power such as France could do in a postcolonial setting was buy Mali some space and time to implement the political reforms that it accepted as the conditions for billions of dollars’ worth of military support.
These political reforms were never implemented. Instead, successive Malian governments, both elected and installed by coups, subcontracted the security of their nation to outside actors, focusing on plundering the country and narrowing their base of political support to its southern Bambara-speaking heartland. Mali’s main revenue source has been the gold mines of Bambouk, which have been producing wealth since at least the 13th-century Malinke kingdoms. In more recent times, Canadian mining companies were the main operators, but the need to pay the Wagner Group for what the West provided for free led the junta to expelling the Canadians in favor of Russian interests.
Later in Resolution 2100, the Security Council makes clear that the reunification of Mali was to be a consensual process based on inclusive political dialogue among all stakeholders. The resolution emphasizes the importance of “inclusive dialogue and active engagement with Malian political groups, including those who have previously advocated independence.” Very little progress was made in this direction. The Algiers Agreement between the Malian government and the Tuareg secessionists was a colossal failure, due to a lack of commitment from the signatories, and dialogue with jihadis was never seriously considered as a viable option to put an end to the war.
Western countries, in turn, were understandably unwilling to play the one trump card they had—disengagement—given that the consequences would be a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe as well as a victory for violent extremists affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Rather than leaving Mali after the military successes of the early 2010s, they adopted a “sunk cost” approach in trying to recoup some small measure of their investment. By giving Mali the wherewithal to make peace—political, military, and economic support—the West also paradoxically gave it an equal wherewithal to refuse to make peace.
So where does this leave Mali in 2025, with the global war on terrorism largely over for the international community in the Sahel? Would a jihadi takeover lead to yet another international military intervention? Would France take the lead, would the United States participate, and would the U.N. endorse? Would the threat of new migrant flows across the Sahel make the EU reengage? Less than 10 years ago, the answer to these questions would have been “yes,” but it is possible that today Mali will be obliged to live with the consequences of its decision to expel its traditional security partners.
The world has changed since the French intervened in 2013 to halt the advance of rebels and jihadis toward Bamako, and the conditions that led to the mobilization of a gratis regional and global coalition no longer exist. The current junta in Mali bet the farm that a combination of Russian mercenaries and its remaining military allies, unbound by rules of engagement or the laws of war, could stem the tide. As jihadi groups gradually close in on Bamako, one does not need the genius of Barbara Tuchman, who wrote about delusion in government, to grasp the folly of that wager. In Mali, the question is who—if anyone—will pick up the pieces.
The opinions and characterizations in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.
